fsck.ext3 questions

[Charles Riley]

Hi,

I posted recently about having a directory turn into a 0 length file.. 
After lots of reading, poking around with debugfs, and running fsck with 
the "-n" parameter, I have some questions.

The problem directory is named 201311. It's inode 15542275.
Poking around with debugfs, I can see that the former subdirectories of 
201311 still have all of their data in them.  In fact, all of their '..' 
entries still point back to the 15542275 inode.

I think I have two options: let fsck do the work, or do it myself using 
debugfs.  The question is, which one is best?

When I ran fsck, it found all of the unconnected directories (which used 
to be subdirectories of 201311) and asked whether to connect them to 
lost and found.  Of course since I ran fsck with the -n parameter the 
answer was no..

Unconnected directory inode 3141911 (???)
Connect to /lost+found? no

Then further on, I got this:
'..' in ... (3141911) is ??? (15542275), should be <The NULL inode> (0).
Fix? no

If I had not run fsck with -n, would fsck have set '..' to lost+found's 
inode rather than <The NULL inode>?

I'm tempted to run fsck and let it do it's thing, and then just move 
things from lost+found to where they belong.
But <The NULL inode>  output from fsck scares me a little bit.

The partition is 1.5TB in size, and the customer doesn't have space for 
me to back it up =(.  So I want to make sure I understand what is going 
to happen if I run fsck.

Thanks guys!

Charles